She’d spotted this teddy bear the last time she was here. But with one thing and another she’d forgotten about it, let it go.

Now here she was, drawn to the shop, drawn to gaze at this sad-looking bear. It reminded her of something. A digi-stream show from her time maybe? A character in an old cartoon? Something, a wisp of a memory that vanished from her mind like a curl of smoke as she reached out to grasp it.

Last night she’d had that dream — no, not dream … nightmare — again. The moment the old man — Foster — had pulled her out from certain death to be recruited to the agency. Their apartment block, one of the super-tall glass and steel tenement towers that you saw everywhere in Mumbai nowadays, was on fire and its steel superstructure had been buckling, preparing to collapse in on itself.

Nowadays? She checked herself. She came from 2026. Nowadays was where she was based, 2001. Her new home … of sorts.

Foster had plucked her from the very last seconds of her life. Given her a choice: to work for the agency or join her family and die in the flames of the collapsing building.

Some choice.

Not that she actually got to choose. Dadda had chosen for her, thrusting her towards the old man … Mama screaming and crying to hold her one more time.

Stop it! Stop it!

Sal bit her lip. She didn’t need to replay the memory again in her head. It was all still fresh enough, thanks. That awful moment was done, her parents gone, dust, and she was here in New York instead of Mumbai. All done. Or, more accurately, yet to be done. Yet to happen twenty-five years from now.

Yet to happen … that at least stole some of the sting of losing her parents, of knowing that they died along with everyone else when that tower block collapsed in on itself. Because — and this is the bit that really messed her head up — they were alive right now. At this moment in time they were children, her age, and they were yet to even meet each other. That was going to happen in twelve years’ time, 2013. They were going to meet at a consumer electronics show in New Delhi. Both their families were going to thoroughly approve of the match, and within the very same year Sal was going to already be a bump growing in her mama’s tummy.